I was chatting with a friend over the weekend who made me look stupid.
We were catching up after a while and we were talking about career paths and opportunities, and I had shared that I was offered to join a few large institutions late last year and earlier this year. Both of which I eventually turned down. And that one of the canonizing questions I had in the back of my head among 2-3 others was: When I leave, could I say I was successful because of the institution or in spite of the institution?
And for the first time, after sharing that set of questions with a few friends when I was in the process of making a decision, someone called me out. “That’s a bad question. That’s a horrible question.”
He goes on, “The question presumes that you are either joining a has-been or never-was institution OR that you couldn’t do anything meaningful while you were there. Given the names you’ve told me, the former is most likely not true. Instead, the framing of the question should be:
“What can you do at this institution that no one else with that job title has done?
“Something you actually wrote about before. On top of that, what can you do at this institution that no other institution would allow you to do? And how can you leverage the hell out of that? Why would you even join an institution where you can’t even leverage their success to date? That would make you look dumb for joining a bad institution when you have the opportunity to join a great one.”
Photo by Timothy Barlin on Unsplash
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